Three years ago the Labour government asked Professor Sir John Lawton, a well-respected academic: “Are we protecting enough land to stop our wildlife declining?” Making Space for Nature, the report from the panel chaired by Prof Lawton, concluded that we’re not, and we must do more. The Government received the report and, promising to be the ‘greenest government ever’, produced the Natural Environment White Paper. Next month, Prof Lawton will be in Oxford as the keynote speaker at the wildlife trust’s annual conference on November 10, so I’m looking forward to hearing his views on the Government’s vision for the natural environment, and what needs to happen to ensure his vision becomes a reality. The Natural Choice: securing the value of nature (the White Paper published last year) was a first step, but it didn’t set out new legislation, relying instead on subtle adjustments to Government policy.

The key sound-bite from Prof Lawton is “more, bigger, better and joined”. In other words, we need to protect more sites for wildlife and they need to be bigger; they should be managed better and, particularly against the background of a changing climate, they must be joined up, so that wildlife can move from one area to another. In Oxfordshire we are starting from a low base. More land in Greater London is given national protection for its wildlife than in Oxfordshire. Where there are important sites, we have some of the very best — from the colourful flower-rich meadows of the Thames floodplains to the rare chalk grasslands and majestic ancient woodlands of the Chiltern Hills. For decades, the wildlife trusts has pointed out that our wildlife is declining, and that the current system of protecting land hasn’t gone far enough to stop the loss of precious biodiversity. The trusts developed the concept of Living Landscapes to encourage a landscape-scale approach to nature conservation involving landowners, local people and planners to meet the challenges of climate change.

The Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust is taking forward Lawton’s “more, bigger, better, more and joined” strategy, and in Oxfordshire we have two Living Landscape areas, the Upper Thames in west Oxfordshire and the Ray Valley, straddling the Bucks boundary. Here we’re working with land managers around existing nature reserves to link fields and meadows using hedgerows, ponds and streams, ensuring that threatened species like the water vole and curlew have the ability to move across large areas. The 404 Local Wildlife Sites in the county have their role too. They are often the vital ‘stepping stones’ for wildlife to move between nature reserves. New research shows that, by April this year, 60 per cent of these important places for wildlife on private land were in positive conservation management compared with just 39 per cent in 2009 — a great step towards the “better managed” in Lawton’s vision. The harsh reality is that unless there is sufficient financial support for positive management for wildlife it will continue to decline. But Prof Lawton’s vision gives us the framework to reverse that — we just need to match the vision with the resources to fulfil it.